Most people spend 12 to 16 years in school pushing their brain to achieve its maximum potential. Schools and colleges make sure a person receives a well rounded education and develops all of their cognitive skills. As soon as a person graduates from school, they immediately become focused on just the skills needed for their career and slowly let their other cognitive skills decay.  With people changing jobs more frequently than ever before, it is important to maintain and even improve all of their cognitive abilities.

By frequently utilizing cognitive game sites like Myfitbrain, a person can stop the decline in their cognitive abilities that they do not use on a daily basis.  Our brains reach their peak efficiencies between the ages of 25 to 27.  This is when our brain finishes maturing and myelination completes.  Myelination allows the nerve impulse to travel down the nerves as fast as possible.  From this point on in a person’s life, aging related activities begin to slow down how fast nerve impulses flow and how fast our brain can react.  Our ability to absorb new information is limitless, but the amount of time it takes to absorb new information slows gradually.

A person’s ability to retrieve that information also begins to slow down.  As we go through life we learn tricks to make that information retrieval as efficient as possible.  By utilizing these tricks, older people can often outperform younger people who have faster minds, but do not have the built up years of experience.

The neuroplasticity of the brain allows for the brain to continually change as we get older.  By exercising, eating right, minimizing stress, and getting a good night sleep we prepare our minds for the information that it will receive on a daily basis.  All of the daily input we receive changes the mind little by little.  Our minds have the ability to continuously improve in many areas if we challenge it.  Many people do not challenge their minds and stare at the TV or spends hours daily on Facebook or Twitter.  By spending 30 – 60 minutes per day on brain games like those found on Myfitbrain, a person can improve their cognitive abilities and slow down or reverse the decay.

Doesn’t the most important organ in your body deserve a little bit of focused brain exercise on a regular basis?

If you are over 25, your brain is atrophying unless you are pushing it to its max.  Read this article to see several ways to keep your brain optimized.

We spend hours at the gym, eat right and go for our annual physicals and eye exams. But the most important organ in our bodies is often the most neglected, says cognitive fitness expert Rebecca Shafir.

Keeping the brain fit, she says, is critical for people’s long-term health.

“You have to use it or loose it,” Shafir, author of “The Zen of Listening,” says of the brain. “As brains age, there is atrophy just like muscles and it slows as it becomes more dormant.”

Shafir, a speech and language pathologist and neurotherapist at Harborside Counseling Services in Newburyport, provides brain fitness training for baby boomers over 50 and seniors who want to preserve and advance their cognitive skills. She also works with adolescents and adults with attention deficit disorder, head injury and stroke.

While physical activity is a good thing, Shafir says, brain exercises are important as well. By practicing a few simple exercises each day, she says people can stave off some of the effects of brain aging, improve their memory and be able to recall items more quickly and precisely.

Landmark results from neuroscience research are debunking yet another myth about aging – that the brain continually loses cells and naturally dims with age.

On the contrary, recent studies show that if we continue to challenge our minds and stimulate our creativity, we not only feel better, we also cause our brains to sprout new branches, or dendrites. These new branches actually improve brain function and help compensate for the small loss of brain cells that comes with age.

In effect, the aging brain responds to mental exercise in much the same way that muscle responds to physical exercise.

In his new book, The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life, world-renowned psychiatrist and gerontologist Gene Cohen shares the latest findings in brain and aging research, and offers a plan for leading a creative and fulfilling life well beyond retirement.

For those who don’t think they have creative potential, Dr. Cohen emphasizes that creativity is not just for geniuses. One does not have to be born with inherited talent or raised in a special environment to be creative. It is universal. He calls it “an equal opportunity attribute.”

Dr. Cohen makes a distinction between creativity with a “big C” and creativity with a “little c.” He defines “big C” creativity as extraordinary accomplishments of unusual people, such as renowned artists, scientists and inventors. Creativity with a “little c” refers to personal creativity, grounded in the various and sundry realities of life. It is something one has brought into being and which has enhanced one’s life and given satisfaction. It could be a new recipe, a floral arrangement, a letter or poem that you wrote, or a new trick you taught your dog. Both dimensions of creativity are valuable, and both continue throughout the human life cycle, independent of age.

Read the rest of this article to learn how to keep your brain young: Think Young! Get Creative!

In a study published in The Journals of Gerontology (Medical Sciences), researchers found that a brain fitness program measured initially for its impact on cognitive abilities in older adults also had a significant beneficial impact on symptoms of depression.

The findings are part of an ongoing study of older Americans funded by the National Institutes of Health and known as the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study. With 2,832 participants, the ACTIVE study is the largest community-based multi-site randomized controlled trial ever conducted that focuses on maintaining or improving cognitive abilities of older people.
Read the rest of this article at:Brain Fitness

One of the most distressing aspects of aging is noticing your own cognitive decline. This is especially true for women. Whether you momentarily forget a grandchild or a colleague’s name, or can’t remember where you put the car key — or worse, the car — these “senior moments” are distinct signs of an aging brain. Cognitive decline can also include an impairment in judgment or executive functioning: the ability to make the right choices in life. When judgment is affected, people begin to make bad decisions that can affect their marriage, their relationships with their children, their careers, or even their health.

Even though the symptoms of cognitive decline are associated with old age, we now know that the changes in the brain that affect memory, attention, processing speed, and decision making begin much earlier. Many women will recognize some attention deficit or memory loss as early as 30 years old. It’s all linked to declining hormone levels which begin during the earliest stages of menopause and perimenopause.

See more on this topic here

We have just added two new fun mental fitness games to Myfitbrain to continue working on more of your cognitive skills.  We are almost complete in the 7 cognitive areas with only language still remaining.  It has been tough to find games that are fun, unique, and supported by research.  If you have any suggestion, please leave a comment.

The first brain game is Spot n Shop.  It is a game that requires you to pay attention to different areas of the screen while you play.  You are presented with a shopping aisle in a store.  You are shown a product and an random aisle number.  You have to remember the aisle number and the location of the product.  As the game’s difficulty level increases, the product gets smaller and the time on screen will get shorter.  The research calls this game a UFOV (Useful Field Of View) game.  One insurance has actually demonstrated how a similar game decreased driving accidents by playing a UFOV brain game.

The second new cognitive game is Matching Chirps.  This is an auditory game where you need to remember chirps that the birds make.  The game starts out pretty easy where you only have to match if the two sounds in a row are identical.  After you get used to that, you have to begin remembering what the prior sound was, or 1 back.  As the game increases in difficulty, you have to remember 2 back etc…  This is brain game based around some research done for improving working memory called N-back cognitive games.  There are even more difficult one based around dual N-back where multiple things change.  For now this looked difficult enough for most people.

I hope you enjoy the games.  If you think we need to change something, please add a comment so we can improve the games for you.

Jim Hanekamp

The choices that you make now can affect how you’ll age later. There are some things you can do to keep that “fountain of youth” flowing for yourself and it goes much further than just having good genes. Remember, genes only account for a third of healthy aging — the rest is up to you. Body+Soul magazine offers smart, simple tips to help you age gracefully–

Interested in these ten tips? Read the rest of this article by following the link: Healthy Aging